


And Now for Something Completely Different

by Kantayra



Series: The Masters and Doctors in the Matrix [18]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Bargaining, Bickering, F/M, Role Reversal, Saving the World, Touch-Starved, World-Saving as Flirting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:40:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27797854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kantayra/pseuds/Kantayra
Summary: It was a tale as old as time: the Doctor and the Master. One of them trying to conquer the universe and twist it to their own selfish ends, and the other stumbling in and thwarting all those carefully laid nefarious plans. Infuriating each other and driving each other mad and absolutely inseparable in their endless dance.Only wait… Which was which, again?The Lumiat meets the Valeyard.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), The Lumiat/The Valeyard
Series: The Masters and Doctors in the Matrix [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592659
Kudos: 36





	And Now for Something Completely Different

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Missy 02 for pretty much everything involving the Lumiat.
> 
> Also bumping this story up earlier in the series where I should have written it in the first place, oops.

The Lumiat awoke with a yawn, a smile, and a luxuriant stretch. The sunlight shone in through the lacy, butter-yellow curtains at her window, a songbird tweeted outside, and the morning was just crisp enough that she could enjoy a nice snuggle under her pink floral duvet, but warm enough that it promised to be a beautiful day.

She hopped out of bed, pulled on plain blouse and skirt and her most sensible pair of shoes, and set about to making breakfast. Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, after all, and she enjoyed her buttered toast, tomatoes, and fresh-squeezed orange juice, while gazing out her window at the lovely pastoral scene outside.

Thus braced for the day, she grabbed her spare TARDIS key and headed for the door.

The scene her door opened onto was…a contrast, to say the least.

Her door was painted a cheery yellow, and she’d eschewed the numbered doorplate her neighbours all used for a smiley face. As a result, her door had been hidden within a pocket of space-time such that it couldn’t really properly be seen from the rest of the Master’s mindscape. It was there if one knew just how to step into the folds between realities, but tucked away from sight as – and the Lumiat had disagreed with herselves in vain on this – an “eyesore”.

Frankly, she found the rest of their mindscape infinitely worse: ostentatious black-marble floors flecked with gold, imposing Ionic columns, sterile white lights glaring down from above, and the cold impersonality of a hotel that was one immediately knew one wasn’t important enough to stay in.

The Lumiat tucked her knit shawl around her shoulders a bit more snuggly and walked firmly towards her exit, head held high and sensible shoes silent on the smooth floor. She smiled and waved to the rest of herself as she passed; only her adolescent self, still unsure enough of himself that he caved in to a moment of peer pressure, waved back. The War Master looked at her as if he thought she was downright mad when she gave him a polite, “Lovely morning, isn’t it?”

Ah well, she’d always known she was a renegade amongst the most notorious renegade of all, an oddment in the Master’s long, nearly unbroken streak of callous disregard for any life but their own. She refused to let any of it bring her down; she would determine her own purpose.

She made her way confidently to the blue police-box that stood off to one side of the atrium. It was the only one that remained unclaimed these days. She’d reluctantly caucused with the rest of herselves when they’d reconstructed the Doctor’s TARDIS (because it had seemed like such a nice thing to do for the Doctors, after all the crimes the Masters had committed against them and their companions), and she’d won herself a key to one of its infinite iterations just like the rest of the Masters. Except, of course, she didn’t have a Doctor to give it to. She’d done nothing whatsoever to any Doctor in her lifetime that she owed them an apology for, except perhaps that they might have enjoyed knowing that at least one of the Masters was capable of some basic empathy.

However, that TARDIS was now her lifeline. She made for the front door and tried very deliberately not to react to the fact that her Eighteenth and Nineteenth incarnations seemed to be working on some sort of star-destroying death-ray with malicious glee in their eyes.

Now, it was a bit of a truism that the incarnations closest to one temporally were loosely analogous to one’s ‘siblings’ in the Matrix: they shared the most common and recent experiences and tended to understand one best. The Lumiat, however, couldn’t even begin to fathom how she’d ever been the Eighteenth Master, who seemed to have the Tenth Doctor strapped across the murderous end of the death ray, complete with a bright red bow in his mouth like a Christmas present.

That poor Tenth Doctor! The Lumiat really couldn’t help but sympathize; he really had been so sweet to them, and they’d tormented him so relentlessly. The Lumiat debated loosening the bonds on his wrists while her Eighteenth wasn’t looking, but the Tenth Doctor seemed to be halfway there on his own anyway, and he gave her a cheeky wink as she passed, looking downright _delighted_ at the way his Master manhandled him.

The Lumiat didn’t really understand their relationship at all, and thus decided not to interfere. The one thing she _did_ understand, with a sinking feeling, was that the casual friendly wink the Tenth Doctor gave her was _nothing_ like the look of raw hunger in his eyes when he gazed upon his Master.

And that, really, was the reason why she didn’t have a Doctor of her own: the Doctors she’d met were all friendly and polite and even enthusiastic in the way they would be towards a dear sister. But passion? Not one of them thought of her in that way, clearly. She was chopped liver.

She didn’t let it get her down, though. She gave the Tenth Doctor an enthusiastic wave, and he waved back with the hand he’d just twisted free of his ropes, and then she said hello to the Eighteenth Master who barely spared her a glance before realizing his Doctor was squirming free, and ran after him to rebind him, to the Doctor’s obvious (and embarrassingly indiscreet) pleasure.

The Lumiat came to a halt in front of Missy, briefly. “I hope you’re having a pleasant morning,” she said.

Missy groaned. “Oh, don’t you ever let up?” she complained.

“Civility costs us nothing,” the Lumiat huffed, enjoying her position of moral superiority perhaps a bit too much.

“ _Civility_ ,” Missy practically spat the word out and shivered as if the very thought repulsed her, “costs us all the fun of seeing the fear in our victims’ eyes when we’re particularly nasty towards them.”

“You can’t fool me, you know,” the Lumiat informed her smugly. “I _know_ that you regret it, all those lives you’ve taken so pointlessly…”

“Would you _shut up_?” Missy hissed at her. “Honestly, you’re worse than the Doctor: ‘Oh Missy, remember that time when you killed all those super obnoxious people, hilariously? Wasn’t that _super sad_?’” She made a face. “I don’t need you, when I can have an _actual_ Doctor whispering sweet redemptions in my ear.”

The Lumiat refused to let it show, but the words stung. Not only did the Doctors have no use for her when they had actual evil Masters to defeat, but the Masters had no use for her either with pretty Doctors about to constantly show them the light. She really had become an outcast even in her own mind: superfluous.

Nevertheless, she knew she was more than that.

“ _Civility_ ,” the Lumiat said in parting triumph, “would’ve shortened this conversation considerably, so that you wouldn’t have been distracted, and then your Doctor might not have made off the power coupling from your cute little death ray.”

Missy’s head shot up in alarm, and there – indeed – was the Twelfth Doctor, freezing deliberately wide-eyed for one moment at being caught in the act, before dashing off with the power coupling under one arm. The Eighteenth Master, uselessly, was caught up in a lip-lock with the Tenth Doctor and didn’t even _try_ to stop the Twelfth Doctor. “Oh, you incorrigible flirt!” Missy blushed, pleased, and chased after her Doctor, parasol in hand.

The Lumiat watched her go, bemused. Some days, her selves were beyond her.

***

Upon first arriving in the afterlife, the Lumiat had found herself at a bit of an existential crossroads.

Atonement had seemed like an appropriate activity for the afterlife. It was rather unfair that she’d have to atone for all herselves, when the rest of her clearly had no interest in doing so, but she’d tried it out anyway. Her other selves’ victims weren’t present, of course, so she’d trying apologizing to the first Doctor she’d stumbled across. That had been the Sixth Doctor, who was perhaps not the best choice, because she’d got no further than “I’m sorry” before he’d blustered in without bothering to determine what she was apologizing _for_ and told her not to worry about it, that all the Doctors couldn’t have the same excellent fashion sense that he did, but he appreciated her desire to improve. The conversation had revealed two things: first, that the Doctors all clearly thought that she was another Doctor, although none of them were ever quite able to place which one; and, second, that the Sixth Doctor clearly had no fashion sense whatsoever, which was a surprise to absolutely nobody.

She’d tried apologizing to Missy next, since her previous self was, technically, the only person she’d actually tried to kill while alive (some habits even survived cryogenetic extraction, who knew?). Missy had looked so deeply disappointed in her, that the Lumiat had actually felt _guilty_ for not delighting in self-murder the way Missy and the Eighteenth Master so clearly did.

Clearly, atonement wasn’t the afterlife for her. So she decided instead to find the one thing that no other Master seemed capable of: peace.

As such, she’d landed the Doctor’s spare TARDIS in a lovely meadow she’d been frequenting of late. It was on the planet Baliophin in the Anaraxian System, and had flowing grasses with warm sun-cream grains and rich violet stems. There, she could do no particular good (which had ended in her trying to murder herself) and no particular evil (which had, likewise, been her trying to murder herself).

She chucked the TARDIS affectionately under the console and earned herself a contented thrumming of the time rotor, before disembarking. The TARDIS doors opened wide before her, and the green sunlight streamed in, and…

The Lumiat frowned.

Right where her luxuriant meadow should be, there was, instead, a giant concrete slab and a battleship towering black and menacing up into the sky above.

The Lumiat paused. She was quite certain she’d got the coordinates right. After all, she wasn’t the _Doctor_ ; she knew how to pilot her ship. However, she knew blind arrogance was a fault of hers, so she forced herself to go back and check: right place, right time. She’d been here just yesterday, when the planet had been a bucolic, serene paradise.

Frowning, she stepped outside again. The monolith seemed to glare down at her tauntingly. It was connected to another and another, as far as the eye could see: an entire fleet yard, it seemed.

With a sigh of resignation, she concluded that someone had been interfering with time in the Masters’ little pocket universe, and that person was – of course – none other than the Master herself.

The Lumiat steeled herself and headed directly for the most flagrant, ostentatious building in sight. It looked to be sort of gigantic skyscraper with a palace situated atop, in such a way that it resembled a giant penis. With _that_ eyesore, need she really look for her other self anywhere else?

As she rounded the corner, she saw the first signs of life since her arrival: a series of overlord guard drones hovered overhead, looking like giant mechanical spiders, and working the salamander-like inhabitants of the planet as slave labour, seemingly to erect an oppressive monolith of a statue. Electronic whips were being liberally applied. The Lumiat groaned and rubbed at her forehead and quickened her pace towards the skyscraper ahead. She was going to have to have a serious talk with herself.

There were more guard robots at the doors, these ones earthbound and distinctly humanoid. They tried to block her way, of course. Luckily, she carried about a spare pulse generator after that one time Missy had sent a swarm of attack drones through her open window, as some sort of misguided ‘welcome to the Matrix!’

She held the pulse generator up with an unimpressed look and zapped every robot’s hardware within a 100-meter radius. They all collapsed to the floor together with a collective thud that was almost amusing. The Lumiat fought back a satisfied little giggle. Really, though, her selves should know better by now than to rely on such shoddy hench-bots.

The problem, though, was that in disabling the robots, she’d accidentally disabled the lifts as well. And, if the numbers above the door were to be believed, there were 942 storeys in this particular monstrosity. She was _not_ walking up all those steps, no matter how sensible her shoes were.

Frustrated, she turned back out the doors and into the street once more. “Hello, slave-bots!” She waved her pulse generator at them. “Escaped humanoid over here, free and happy, not worshipping your Master, yoo-hoo! Better come capture me right now!”

She tapped her toe on the pavement impatiently as one of the drone slave-drivers peeled away from the construction site to come do her bidding. As it approached, she backed into the lobby of the skyscraper so that it would follow her. She led it to the direct centre of the lobby, where she would have plenty of space to work, and zapped it matter-of-factly.

It slumped to the floor, like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

“Sorry, sorry!” she said with a little laugh, and used the steel-toe insert on one of her very sensible shoes to pry open its side panel. “I just can’t help myself!”

Five minutes later, she’d defried the drone’s circuitry, reprogrammed its subroutines, and made herself a neat little hover-car.

“942nd floor, please!” she said with a delighted clap as she hopped onto the top of the bot’s control disk.

It zoomed obediently up the central column of the spiral stairwell, passing dozens of floors and then hundreds. At this speed a human would’ve been dead, and even a Time Lord would’ve felt a bit woozy, but the lovely thing about the Matrix was that the laws of physics couldn’t harm her anymore, so instead she laughed with glee at her near-lethal hack.

They came to a too-sudden halt at the top that technically should’ve scrambled her brains, but in actuality just left her feeling adrenaline-strung.

“Down, boy,” she ordered, and the robot set her down neatly in the elevator lobby. “Now,” she informed it sternly, “no more enslaving those nice salamander-people out there, do you hear?”

The robot’s whip-arm slumped dejectedly. She gave it a forgiving pat on the central processor and sent it off to whatever de-evil-ified slave-bots did in their free time.

The elevator lobby led to a door (that stuck), which in turn led to a massively pretentious colonnade, which led to a hall of snivelling sycophants, which contained a staircase leading up to a control centre, which contained at its centre a grandiose black-leather chair with its back to her. Honestly, inadequacy issues all over the place!

The snivelling sycophants whispered agitatedly amongst themselves as she strode directly for the staircase. It seemed as though they thought that maybe they should do something, but oppression-obedience-blah-blah-blah from whoever-knew-how-many centuries under her other self had turned them into useless jellyfish.

The Lumiat skipped up the steps to the control centre (sensible shoes for the win, once again!), and cleared her throat loudly. The sound echoed ostentatiously through the overblown imperial halls.

Slowly, the great chair swivelled.

“Ahem!” the Lumiat said. “Do you _mind_? I was planning a lovely picnic this afternoon, and—oh no, it’s _you_!”

Perched upon the great chair, one eyebrow raised and looking thoroughly unimpressed, was the Valeyard.

The Lumiat blinked at him in disbelief, taken aback for the first time. “Congratulations on finally losing the skullcap, by the way,” she babbled inanely, while she quickly readjusted all her assumptions. “It’s a massive improvement. A shame I can’t say the same about the environmental destruction, planetary enslavement, and temporal displacement.”

The Valeyard rolled his eyes at her. “You have your afterlife, and I have mine,” he insisted. “I had thought all of us Doctors had agreed to give each other space to spread out.”

There were so many things wrong with that, but primary among them was: “‘Space to spread out’ doesn’t mean conquering a whole planet!”

“Rough,” he retorted. “This is my afterlife recreational activity. Choose your own, elsewhere.”

“But the _people_!” the Lumiat protested.

The Valeyard mouthed it back at her disdainfully. “I wasted enough of my lives saving ‘the people’ already, worthless ingrates! What did it ever get me?”

The Lumiat glared at him, hands on hips. She was having that feeling it again: the urge to rip someone’s hearts out, maybe juggle with them a bit afterward for good measure. She reminded herself that she was _good_ , that she was better than that – and then she saw a flash of the universe pendant in his hand, where he had the chain to it wrapped around his wrist – and she also reminded herself that _revenge_ was better than murder any day.

“Oh dear,” she said with a sweet smile, affecting a calm façade that she didn’t entirely feel. “Is _that_ how you changed the time-stream? Hacked the Master’s personal universe – where ever _did_ you get a copy? – and used it to rearrange existence on this planet so that its entire history was rewritten to worship _you_?”

“It was simple enough,” the Valeyard insisted haughtily, “and as I don’t see the Master objecting any time in the near future, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The Lumiat tsked at him, shaking her head sadly, and then took exceptional delight in linking telepathically to the pendant universe and re-righting this planet’s trajectory with a sudden whip-snap of time.

The great chair and the stairs and the colonnade and the sycophants and the skyscraper and the slave-bots and the warship yards all melted instantaneously, like dissolving gelatine, back into the earth. The Valeyard and the Lumiat plummeted with the shrivelling ectoplasm of never-was. When the timeline resettled itself, the Lumiat was standing once more in a lovely meadow – oh there, that was a magnificent calilia tree, perfect for a nice picnic! – and the planet’s inhabitants could be seen back to their farming in the distance, the TARDIS was now visible amidst the flowers the next field over, and the Valeyard had fallen right on his rear into a mud puddle. That last bit was totally accidental, of course. She hadn’t been aiming for that _at all_.

The Valeyard leapt up to his feet and sputtered. It took him a moment’s concentration, but he called upon the Matrix to vanish the mud from his person, alas.

“Do _you_ mind?” he shot back her own question from earlier. “I was right in the middle of something!”

She yawned, deliberately. “Yes, well, I stopped it, didn’t I?”

“What is wrong with you?” The Valeyard glowered at the Lumiat and kicked listlessly at a clod of grass before him. “Surely, there is enough space in this universe for all of us?”

“Not on _my_ picnic planet,” the Lumiat sniffed.

“Fine,” he grumbled, “you win. As always. I’ll go conquer another planet. If you don’t mind?”

She hadn’t really thought about it until then. All the people on her lovely picnic planet had their own lives back again. But… “That depends…”

“On?” The Valeyard had been about to stalk off, but turned back to her now, annoyed.

“Well, I suppose you were planning to do the exact same thing to the next planet along?”

He snorted derisively. “Of _course_ I’m planning to do the exact same thing to the next planet along. What else would I do?”

“Oh, well then. I suppose I do mind.” She buffed her fingernails self-consciously.

He groaned. “Why are you bothering me anyway? Don’t you have a Master to thwart somewhere? All the _other_ Doctors have had the decency to leave me alone.”

The Lumiat blinked at him. “I _am_ the Master!” she informed him, because it really should have been obvious by now.

The Valeyard scoffed at that, but he eyed her up and down all the same. “Preposterous!” He licked his lips, and his eyes went a bit unfocused. “Only another Doctor would…”

“Oh, this is so typical of you Doctors and your arrogance!” the Lumiat retorted. “Of course a _Master_ could never defeat _you_! I mean, how else do you think I took control over this pocket universe so easily? It was literally made for me!”

“Now, now, my dear,” the Valeyard said, starting to look agitated at her adherence to her story. “Enough of this game. I doubt I’ll be able to restore that alternate timeline anytime soon. There’s no reason to maintain such a cruel trick, when we both know what you’re saying is impossible.”

“That you, of all Doctors, would doubt me!” She, of course, was feeling equally agitated. “You should know better: if a Doctor can be evil, why can’t a Master be—”

“Good?” The Valeyard laughed. “Because I have fought the Master in countless incarnations across space and time, and they’re all clever enough,” he admitted with some admiration but not much more than that, “some of them have even been worthy rivals, but none of them has ever…”

The Lumiat stepped right up into his face in challenge and finished, “Thwarted you? Right where you deserve it?”

The Valeyard’s eyes darkened at the very suggestion. “You can’t be…” he breathed.

“I am the misgeneration that resulted when the Master used an Elysian field to concentrate everything that was good and pure and decent in them, to regenerate past the point of no return,” the Lumiat insisted, their faces mere inches apart now, as if gravity or magnetism or some other force were pulling them together.

“No,” the Valeyard shook his head, “that’s what _I_ am, but in reverse, for the Doctor!”

“And you honestly believe that we Masters wouldn’t do the exact same thing? That our obsession is so incomplete that we wouldn’t match you, step for step?”

The Valeyard, for the first time, looked flabbergasted. Because, when put that way, of _course_ the Masters would have a secret white-sheep lurking about, the same way he was the Doctors’ secret black-sheep. “If you're joking…” he began, a hint of despairing hope breaking his words.

“I’m not joking. Look into my mind and see for yourself.”

The Valeyard reached out tentatively with two fingers and brushed them against the Lumiat’s forehead. She continued to stare up at him, unblinking and unwavering. She felt him, then, fumbling a bit clumsily but enthusiastically at the outer defences of her mind – telepathic games never had been the Doctor’s strong suit. She gave him a little window to slip through, and he mind pierced hers, quick and sudden, with little finesse. He gasped in rapture in response, and she let out a small sigh, finding herself charmed despite his lack of experience.

“You are…” His eyes were wide with disbelief now, and she nudged her cheek into the hand that held the telepathic connection between them.

“I _was_ minding my own business,” she returned to his point from earlier. “After all, the Doctors have all the other Masters well in hand, so I wasn’t needed there. But now that I know that _you_ are out there, warping reality to your whims, I will do everything in my power to stop you. And you know just how very skilled I am in hunting you to the farthest-flung reaches of the universe.”

The Valeyard gulped, and he stepped back away from her suddenly, his fingers moving to clutch at the universe pendant around his wrist instead. “I’m not giving it up!” he insisted. “This universe is mine! I suffered and died and wasted life after life saving this stupid universe, and I never got anything in return! You’re not taking that away from me!”

The Lumiat nodded once. To tell the truth, she didn’t particularly want his universe. “Tell you what: I’ll make you a deal. You keep the universe that rightfully belongs to me, and I’ll keep the TARDIS that rightfully belongs to you. Call it a fair trade.”

The Valeyard glanced sceptically over at where his old TARDIS could be seen in the far meadow. “That old thing? Why would you even want it?”

“Deal or not?” the Lumiat demanded sternly, while thinking to the TARDIS, _Ignore him, beautiful! He doesn’t know what he’s missing. I’ll take good care of you._

The TARDIS thrummed back at her, nuzzling into her reassurances.

“Deal!” the Valeyard said in less than a heartsbeat. He held up one hand, and she eyed it suspiciously for a moment, before clasping it with her own.

A telepathic frisson passed between them, in which the Lumiat relinquished her hold on the pocket universe he’d been keeping from her, and he in turn surrendered his symbiotic link to the TARDIS.

The Valeyard shivered and stepped away when the transfer was complete. “And now, if you don’t mind,” he said with an almost-polite incline of his head, “I have an empire to rebuild.”

“Oh, by all means, go ahead,” the Lumiat said sweetly, folding her hands before her.

The Valeyard eyed her askance. “You’re not leaving,” he accused.

“Of course not,” she agreed.

“We agreed that this universe is mine,” he said suspiciously.

“So we did.” The Lumiat nodded.

“Which means that I would be well within my demesne to boot you and your little Type 40 directly out of it.”

“If you like. And then _I’d_ be well within my _demesne_ , to take my little Type 40 and materialize right back in it again,” she said with a smug smile.

“I can kick you out—”

“—As many times as I can pop back in,” she finished, and then stepped back up into his space again. “But, if you do, then you won’t get the pleasure of me thwarting you again.” She reached out to adjust the collar of his coat, straightening it.

Something that might have been a whimper escaped his lips at the thought of, after all this time, a _Master_ of his very own, to oppose him whenever he liked…

The Lumiat didn’t like to admit it, but her chest felt a bit tight as well, her hearts racing as she awaited his verdict. (However, still being a Master at hearts, she would continue to pursue and badger him with dogged tenaciousness if the answer was no, until he changed his mind. She might have been a pariah amongst the Masters, but she hadn’t changed _that_ much.)

“Very well then,” the Valeyard said, trying to sound composed, but coming across too breathless to really make the whole cool-and-collected façade work, “I suppose a sort of…partnership of opposition would be satisfactory.”

“Satisfactory?” the Lumiat tsked. “No, no, my dear. I am _far_ from ‘satisfactory’. I will hound you to the ends of the cosmos. Just when you think you’ve won, that you’ve escaped me, I will come at you like a fury and lay all your plans to waste. Before long, you’ll anticipate – and dread – my coming at every turn. I am the e’er-do-well of your nightmares.”

A growl tore from the Valeyard’s throat in response, and he slammed her back against the trunk of the calilia tree and smashed his lips down onto hers furiously.

The Lumiat gasped and then moaned into the force of his kiss. He was clumsy and violent in his mashing of their mouths, but she nipped him back sharply enough once that he shuddered against her, and she pressed her advantage – just as she forever would any advantage he gave her – to tease her tongue into his mouth, coaxing and seducing him into something smoother, richer, gentler.

He seemed just as pleased with that, if not even more so. He pushed up against her even harder, and one of his hands slid its way up her skirts.

At which point, because the Lumiat was such a good girl, the scene faded away to black.

...

..

.

..

...

Just kidding.

Instead, she leapt upon the Valeyard, wrapping her legs around his waist like a vice, her arms clinging to him. He stumbled back at her sudden amorous ferocity, and the two of them fell back against a recently harvested haystack: him falling back onto it in surprise when the backs of his thighs collided with it, and her bracing herself up on top of him, pushing him down fully onto his back.

The entire time their mouths didn’t part from each other, taking their fill of a genuine, honest-to-Rassilon _enemy_ after having gone starved for so long without.

The Lumiat scrambled at his flies, which weren’t quite as absurd as traditional Gallifreyan robes, but weren’t that much better in the end. In the meantime, the Valeyard tossed her over into the absolute mess they were making of the haystack, like he thought that he was actually going to be on top or something, poor delusional thing…

She rolled the pair of them right back around and circled her fingers around his cock at the same time, which rendered him effectively a blithering mess. She had to admit, she understood: she had thought to spend eternity untouched as well, and the thought that she’d miscalculated made her throat go dry. As far as she felt from the title of Master most days, this part felt good: being in control, directing and manipulating him however she wanted. Perhaps she wasn’t entirely the complete inversion of herselves that she usually tried to be.

The Valeyard, as to be expected, did not take to this reversal of fortunes kindly and lunged up at her. Oh my, all that pent-up frustration really was quite lovely. She was starting to understand why the Doctors had danced through all her other selves’ attempts at universal domination all those years. Being untouchable but _wanted_ so deeply was a heady high.

He caught her lips again, and she let him draw her down until their bodies were pressed tightly together. She’d lost hold of his cock during their bracing little struggle for dominance, but now she found him again and scrambled to yank up her skirt with her other hand. Hay flew about madly, and she could feel it in her clothes and hair. There was something quite primitive about that: a literal roll in the hay. How naughty!

Neither of them had much in the way of experience, given that they’d been personae non gratae amongst their selves while alive, and Elysian fields really did quite an effective job reprogramming one’s personality and memories such that the key encounters between their past selves were quite hazy. As a result, they fumbled about like inept virgins, which was delightful in its own way.

And, while they might not have been as effective at aligning their bodies and hearts and minds as their other incarnations, when the Lumiat finally slid down onto him to take him inside her, it was no less satisfying.

The Valeyard groaned and reached for her hips, and they bucked and thrusted against each other, hay thrown up every which way, itchy and messy and chaotic. The Lumiat finally found the right angle and rode him – long and thick and deep inside her – her head thrown back and hands clinging to his shoulders.

He sneaked a hand into her blouse, almost tentative, and palmed her breast before flicking his thumb over one nipple. She gasped and opened her eyes again to look down at him.

“I will,” he informed her raggedly, “not tolerate any interference in my plans.”

“And I,” she retorted, just as out of breath, “will not tolerate any cruelty towards innocent lives.”

“They’re not even,” he complained, then broke for a gasp and a moan when she twisted down hard onto him, “real lives! They’re just data files!”

“Those data files have just as much right to live their lives as you or I,” she insisted, and then broke off with a squeak when his thumb rubbed her nipple exactly right.

“You’re insane!” he concluded, and his other hand dropped to her clit, mirroring the action of his thumb upon her breast there. “No one can be _that_ excessively good. You’re worse than the Doctor, even!”

“Oh, my dear,” the Lumiat moaned, “don’t you know? I’ve _always_ been worse than the Doctor.” And came with an inrush of starry-white light.

He came as well, she was reasonably certain, amidst the supernova of pleasure that exploded from within her. Well! Wasn’t that… _nice_?

The sun shone down on her, and the breeze rustled her hair, and the hay scratched at her knees, and her whole body shuddered, one with a Doctor’s just as she’d always been meant to be.

***

She must’ve drifted off at that point, because when she awoke again, he’d sidled out from under her and was dressing hurriedly. She smiled and murmured contently to herself, “Still the Doctor, aren’t you? Under all those attempts at egomaniacal tyranny, you _still_ run away at the first signs of intimacy.”

The Valeyard froze, leg just stepped through one trouser leg, and looked back at her in alarm. “I’ll never be rid of you now, will I?” he groused.

The Lumiat laughed and kicked her feet wildly in the air in jubilation. (She’d lost one of her sensible shoes somewhere along the way; how about that?) “ _Never_ ,” she swore vehemently, almost a threat. “Two misfits like us? We’re _meant to be_.” She beamed up at him.

The Valeyard gulped and clutched at the universe in his palm. “You’re welcome to catch me if you can,” he challenged, and the pocket universe pulsed, and then his biodata vanished, transporting him to who-only-knew where. But there had been just the hint of a come-hither smile at the edges of his lips that he tried to suppress but couldn’t entirely.

The Lumiat sighed and lay back in the hay and squeezed her eyes shut tight. She understood now. She’d thought she’d been a castaway, derelict, undesirable, an other even to herselves. She’d thought her purpose lay elsewhere. But, in the end, she was the Master, and she always had been. Her purpose was clear:

“Ready or not,” she called out to all of space and time, “here I come!”

She was going to find that bastard Valeyard of a Doctor, capture him, and make him _hers_ forever. And, in doing so, she would have so very much fun along the way.


End file.
